Note: I dictated this into my phone’s WordPress app using text-to-speech just after waking up from the dream described. I’ve edited it to clean up glaring TTS inaccuracies and added some punctuation, but it’s otherwise as I originally spoke it.

Masses of people are shoulder to shoulder, cheek to jowl in tiny rooms and endless hallways and elevators shouting and talking and whimpering and crying for hours endlessly. Elevators that connect to other elevators going up and down. Shuffling from place to place, memories only lasting moments. It seems like we’ve been here forever but I can only remember the last few minutes.

I find an empty hallway leading to a screen door with a sign that says Emergency Exit. It looks like this has not been used in decades. On the other side of the door is an abyss. I didn’t go through but I sat at the door and breathe the clean air.

I share this secret with one and then another companion. The second has a son. I don’t know how he remembers he has a son; something about being a parent much transcend the memory wipe that happens every few minutes. The son is having a panic attack and can’t breathe, so we bring him down the empty hallway to the emergency exit to sit by the screen door. After a few minutes he is yanked from his father’s grasp and drawn back into the fray by an invisible hand. There’s a warning message; we can feel it, but we can’t hear it. It says something like Boy has spent too much time outside. Penalty. His father cries so we reassure him will find him again. We’ll always find him.

I look at the screen door and wonder why I’ve never opened it. I push the latch. The door swings open and I sit on the ledge and look out. Blackness. Far below I can see a very dim outlines of rectangular shapes, stacks of something. As I keep gazing out into the dark it seems like the floor below is not as far as it was. I turn around, grab the ledge and lower myself until I am hanging by my fingertips from the screen door. I look down. The floor now seems just a few feet below me. I let go. I fall in slow motion and land on what I can only describe as a stack of empty dvd boxes, but on a scale where I am very small or they are very very large. Looking around I see endless stacks of various heights in the distance.

Off to my left there is a hill and beyond the hill what seems to be a building. A low, long office with lights in the windows. More of the lights come on and I see movement on the hill heading towards me. They’re coming.